T. F.  Powys

‘A thousand years of happiness can be found here in one moment’

The theme of the irresoluble conflict between the morality to which humans aspire and the evil to which they too often succumb is a hallmark of T. F. Powys.

Theodore Francis Powys was born in 1875 at Shirley in Derbyshire, one of the eleven children of the Rev. Charles Powys, an Anglican clergyman of evangelical views. His family was predominantly Welsh but was also related to Donne and Cowper. T. F. Powys, unlike his elder brothers John Cowper and Llewelyn, did not go to Cambridge. Instead, for a short time, he farmed in Suffolk. Then, in 1901, he settled in a labourer's cottage at Studland on the Dorset coast, to live a life of contemplation on his father's allowance of £60 a year. In 1904 he moved to East Chaldon, also in Dorset, and in 1905 married Violet Rosalie Dodds. They had two sons, one of whom died in Kenya.

Powys's first book was An Interpretation of Genesis, begun in 1904 and privately printed in 1908. In this he made use of the dialogue form, but it was only in 1916 that he turned to fiction, with Mr Tasker's Gods, an essay in realism published in 1925. In 1917 he wrote Black Bryony, published in 1923. He first became known as a writer with The Left Leg, a collection of three stories, in which his gift for the extended fable begins to emerge. This 'was followed by Mark Only (1924), Mockery Gap (1925) and Innocent Birds (1926). In 1927 came his best-known masterpiece, Mr Weston’s Good Wine, an allegory of good and evil in which Mr Weston figures as both wine-merchant and God. Another important book was Fables (1929), largely consisting of dialogues between common­place objects, and animals. Kindness in a Corner was published in 1930, and in 1931 came The Only Penitent and the last full-length novel, Unclay. Throughout this period Powys was also writing short stories, four collections of which were later published. A comprehensive selection of them is to be found in God's Eyes A' Twinkle (1947).

The same countryside, the same characters, recur from book to book. Within this context operates that startling awareness of men's actions and beliefs which, with his mastery of the humorous understatement and his great originality, marks all T. F. Powys's fiction.

In 1940, with his writing career behind him, Powys moved to the quite village of Mappowder in North Dorset where he died in 1953. 

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“T. F. Powys puts no frontier between the comic and the serious; for him they overlap. As a result, no one ever knew to what extent he was joking; also, he was a difficult man to play a joke on. Llewelyn hid in a gorse bush, as Theodore, deep in thought, passed by. 'Theodore!' he intoned. Theodore turned and said quietly, 'Yes God?' Llewelyn knew that his brother thought that God might turn up at any minute; however, what Llewelyn could never know is whether Theodore had already spotted him in the gorse bush. T. F. Powys leaves his readers in the same intriguing uncertainty.” - P J. Kavanagh

‘I have never had one,’ replied Death simply, ‘though in coming here this morning I met a little girl who made fun of my beard and called me “John".’

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